Thought Leadership Video Series

HP's Alon Bar-Shany shares Indigo Strategy

Cary Sherburne: Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Alon Bar-Shany, who is the general manager of HP's Indigo business. Welcome.

Alon Bar-Shany: Thanks Cary. Good to be here.

Cary Sherburne: So gosh we're almost to Drupa now and it's been four years since the last one obviously. You guys have been a little busy. Maybe you can tell us what you've been up to.

Alon Bar-Shany: Right, well we came back from the previous Drupa exhausted, but actually very pumped up because we had an excellent show. We just released our new products, the Indigo 7000 and the WS 6600 and obviously we were very focused on getting these products out and then installing them and making sure our customers were successful and that went very well, but behind the scenes literally the day after Drupa we started saying okay Drupa 2012 you know. We got the hotels. We took the booth. What are we going to bring to market? And I would say we did two major efforts. One is taking the existing products including the ones we had just launched in 2008 and making them better and making sure we continued to enable the existing customers to have growth, profitable growth, new applications, which we have with an upgrade of pretty much all our existing portfolios, the 7600 and the 5600, etcetera.

But most of the effort was really moved into designing the next generation of the Indigo technology and it was very clear after Drupa 2008 what people wanted from us was format. They loved the quality. They loved the versatility. They loved the seven colors. They saw some prototypes of B2, 29 inch sheet fed devices and everybody said if you could do that without losing all of your existing capabilities that would be a homerun. So we went back and we started with a few people designing and looking at options and architecture and then within an year and a half we had the early prototype and then you start moving into—and the next generation of prototypes and sure enough, last week we announced the Indigo 10,000, which is a sheet fed 29 inch press with a media versatility and the seven colors and the automated duplexing and the reactions have been actually unbelievable. We've hosted customers in Israel and now here at DScoop and we've also designed this press as a platform and with the announcement of the 10,000 we announced the 20,000 and the 30,000, which have been specifically designed for the packaging markets, which are really booming these days.

Cary Sherburne: So the 20,000 is a roll fed.

Alon Bar-Shany: The 20,000 is a roll fed for flexible packaging. Again seven colors, very thick, very thin layers with an esco [ph] graphics workflow and some inline priming capabilities and the 30,000 is a sheet fed, same or similar workflow and priming capabilities, but it's able to print on thick substrates with a sheet fed device. They're both what the Indigo team calls the one-shell technology, so tight registration and really ideal for the packaging world.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting transition because you had really two separate product lines and now with this platform you're really bringing them together from an industry engineering perspective.

Alon Bar-Shany: Yeah, well you know this is our fourth generation, so-called fourth child. I have four children, so you love them all, but every time you learn a little bit more and I think honestly the advantages we bring is not just the technology. It's the massive customer input that's gone into the design of these presses because we've sat with our existing customers and they've given us really a lot of advice and a lot of input in how to design something, which is not just a great technology, but it fits into their offset or digital environment.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah and I had the pleasure of being able to see these in operation in Israel and it was really quite amazing and you know if you listen to a lot of the industry pundits we've been saying or some of them have been saying for awhile you know toner has reached its level, its plateau and now the next generation is ink jet, but you guys just completely blew that away with this and it's a game changer.

Alon Bar-Shany: Thank you. I'm happy to hear that and again ink jet is a great technology for certain applications and I think the Indigo technology is unique and privileged. It has certain advantages that nobody else has and we'll keep working on it and trying to make it better and when you're here at D-Scoop and you see the excitement of the customers and their dreams of what they can do with it, it really motivates you to go back and try even harder.

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